Vivat Libertas

This article talks about porn, sexual harassment and bullying. If you are uncomfortable with this, you probably shouldn't read it . In the UK, porn websites will now have to verify that their users are over 18 - perhaps with credit card information. Plenty of people are hailing this as a good thing to protect our children, but frankly, I think it's going to be about as useful as a chocolate teapot. Firstly, there are a mind-boggling number of porn sites out there and more will spring up. The BBFC is not going to have the time or resources to block them all. Secondly, not all porn is on sites dedicated to watching people fuck. I think I've gone to a dedicated porn site exactly once in my life, but I've still seen a lot of porn. How? Reddit and tumblr host a fair amount (including pornbots everywhere - spectate lecherous women online!). Snapchat too. Twitter used to be full of pornbots. DeviantArt has been around forever, but has a ton of drawn images and directions...

It's one of those days. I have too many deadlines, the world is run by overgrown toddlers who are going to get us all killed, and May's just called a general election. Bleh. I can't hide my cynicism about this. And on top of everything, I would have to be depressed, because the best way to react to turmoil in my life is to stop being a functional human being. I've been to my GP and am now sitting tight on a referral, but the service is apparently overstretched because the NHS has no money. Right now, all I can do is wait for them to process my reference and see if they think I'm mental enough to qualify for their help. In the meantime, I've been trying to be proactive, because it beats being miserable and not doing anything. Because I still more or less trust the NHS, I looked at some of their resources for self-care, where they suggested self-help books. I'm not opposed to self-help books when used in conjunction with some kind of therapy and w...

...actually, the positive thinking sort of worked. Well, not quite, but sort of. What worked better for me wasn't trying to cultivate a happy happy shiny shiny attitude. It was doing what my body told me to do and getting some sleep. It was doing what my mind told me to do and getting out of the house to see some green space. It was seeing my amazing boyfriend and holding him, spending time with him, spending time just talking and making music and exploring new things. It was realising that I have really, really good friends, who care about me and actually want to spend time with me. It was realising that all of those things have been there since the beginning and I'm only just noticing them. It was going to parties and dancing badly and ending up covered in my friend's soft toys. It was diving deep into physics books and connecting with what made me love physics - with the strange and beautiful and elegant ways of viewing the world - and drawing on that to stud...

(Actually, the inspirational quotes did nothing.)

This semester, I've been taking a C++ course. I like programming. I want to suck less at it. So far, it's going okay. My workload is heavy, so I don't write so much anymore. I don't expect it to get easier. I find I learn programming decently by reading around - by reading documentation and forums and random pdfs I find lying about. I learn about culture and other people's personalities. Even if something isn't directly relevant to me, I still find it useful. While trawling the internet to fix my current problem, I came across an essay by Paul Graham . It was useful, but not immediately so; it gave me food for thought, but it's not something I feel I have the free time to learn right now (I should really spend it sleeping). Somewhere in the back of my sleep-deprived brain, I remembered...something. A website very, very similar to the one I was looking at. In fact, the layout was almost identical - but the essays were different. The one I was reading di...

It's two weeks until Christmas, give or take. I could only tell this from a calendar; from my perspective, it's been Christmas since about November. There are things I enjoy about this. I enjoy ambling through the city centre and smiling up at the decorations. I enjoy making fun of the huge, rather unsettling Santa who watches over Albert Square. I enjoy carolling in the freezing cold, strangely enough. I enjoy going round the markets with friends or my partner and picking out nice gifts. Those eyes...they haunt me. What I really don't enjoy is the pressure surrounding Christmas. There's so much pressure to make Christmas magical; to get everyone the perfect gifts, to cook the perfect traditional meal, to be a perfect happy family, and what usually ends up happening is not knowing what gifts to get, being thoroughly sick of turkey by the end of the month and sniping at each other. And alcohol. So much alcohol. In my family, Christmas was like any other day and...

Hey! Don't shoot the messenger. Don't shoot Lord Kerr either, since he's the one who said it. The media is in a tizzy because Lord Kerr called native Britons stupid when defending immigration . I have some poorly organised thoughts about this. Firstly, Lord Kerr was a diplomat before becoming a life peer. He knows exactly how much shit he's stirring up. Why he's doing this I don't know, but his comments are apparently so inflammatory to the right that Stormfront's cryfest (no links, fascists deserve to be deprived of oxygen) was one of the top results when I googled this. Maybe he's hoping that they get too distracted circlejerking over how racist he is to white people. That's the best-case scenario. Secondly, I'm actually pretty upset about his comments. Of course I'm angry at xenophobic Brits. Of course I'm even more irritated when they're stupid into the bargain. But he punched down at a lot of the more marginalised peopl...

I think redemption as a concept is underrated. I mean, sure, there are these people who will try and sell you redemption if you follow their book, or pay them enough money, or have someone else treat you as their pity porn. Perhaps that's why redemption is overlooked. Perhaps it's just that we live in a society which exalts violence and vengeance. (Seriously - our justice system is based on retribution, most narratives in fiction involve overcoming an obstacle with murder, and we are encouraged to support armies.) The main argument against redemption seems to be "but this person had other chances" or "but this means that this person gets off scot free". I'll admit that I don't have good counterarguments. I have blunt statements and a belief system. Many people have many, many opportunities through life. Some are easier to achieve than others; some are almost impossible. People will make mistakes. People will actively do malicious things. You...

Now that America is divided over whether to elect a reasonably competent establishment candidate or a creepy orange fascist, the media have stopped pretending they ever gave a shit about antisemitism; instead, they're pretending they give a shit about the US. I didn't get to do this before on account of having a massive workload, but a lot of the reactions to the antisemitism shitstorm upset me massively. Many of them were pure denial: "I've never seen antisemitism in my community, so it must not exist." Many of them were denial mixed with tokenism: "I'm going to weaponise Jews who don't see antisemitism and use them as a tool to conveniently ignore people who disagree with me." Many fell back on the old chestnut that "anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism." (It isn't, but blathering about "Zionist control of the media" or "Zionists did 9/11" is very clearly an antisemitic dogwhistle. Regurgitating antisemitic r...

I don't know where to begin with this, but I'll try: I am weirdly passionate about graphs. The idea that you can order numbers in space and time, and make them make lines and curves that tell you things, is simple - you're probably used to making graphs (and possibly heartily sick of them). It's so simple that I think we forget how powerful graphs are, that they take millions of experiences and put them in a form we can understand more intuitively. I'm going to put forward a proposal that will probably make most of you groan in frustration: graphs should inspire people. Okay, when I write it that way, that just sounds confusing. Inspirational quotes are one thing, but what the hell is an inspirational graph ?! I can't really answer my own question, unfortunately, except to say that an inspirational graph moves you on an emotional level. It reminds you of something beyond the graph, or makes you feel like you had an epiphany, or gives you some quiet satis...

Neoclassical economics is failing. I would go so far as to say that this is no longer controversial; its flaws have been known about for many decades now. Many, many fields have sprung from this failure - I would say that this is an extremely good thing. Some readers might wonder why I'm writing about economics at all. Importantly, I'm not an economist and have no formal training in the subject - I'm a vaguely interested party. I'm about as qualified as the pub bore (or most politicians) to tell you about the efficacy of various models; the difference is that I know I'm out of my depth. I am going to be discussing the perception of one particular field within economics, based on my experience with related fields. A more general concern is: why talk about the economy at all? Everyone talks about the economy. Everyone else is fed up of hearing about the economy, fed up of hearing about why the economy means that the rich have to get richer and the poor have to...

Obligatory disclaimer: I'm not a statistician or a sociologist. My qualifications come from being a physics undergraduate, where I live and breathe error analysis in the lab, and also from reading around the subject. Finally, I use Twitter far too much; it's really just morbid fascination at this point. Oh well. Last year, Twitter introduced polls as a thing you can add to your tweets. This was more likely than not done to poke Twitter into being vaguely profitable, since it's stagnant as hell. Unfortunately, polls are only as good as the people making them and Twitter is a wretched hive. There have been some really good polls not used as polls - for example, a wacky choose-your-own-adventure romp which started with swiping left or right on a famous politician's Tinder profile - but Sturgeon's Law applies and most polls are...well...crappy. "Why are Twitter polls so bad?" you might ask. Turns out that addressing the how instead of the why is far m...

Overall, I like situated criticism - the idea that being a part of X group gives you a lived experience inaccessible to those outside X, and makes you more qualified to speak on X than someone who doesn't know anything about it. I think it's a good thing. I think historically lived experience has been discredited as subjective and thus not worthy of attention. However, I don't like certain ways it's used. Namely, I really, really do not like the fact that it can make someone into a token. For example, let's say that I'm the only woman in a room full of men (a really common situation for me, because of my area of study). Let's also say that I'm the only woman in a room full of men talking about feminism (this has happened). At some point, one of them will get nervous and ask "as a woman, what do you think?". As a woman, here's what I think: Think for yourselves. You're grown adults. You can deal with criticism from another grown ...

Happy Bi Visibility Day, everyone! It's the one day in the year when us bisexuals can finally be seen with the naked eye! Okay, I'm done being corny - but I'm really glad we have a day to be visible, since we're often ignored or told we're somehow "wrong" by more people than I care to list. (I am angry that basically anyone under the LGBTQIAP+ umbrella who isn't cis L or G is ignored or marginalised.) (I will be using LGBTQIAP+, even though it's not exhaustive, because other acronyms such as MOGAI [Marginalised Orientations, Genders and Intersex] and GSRM [Gender, Sexual and Romantic Minorities] are less well-known, and LGBTQQIP2SA is long . I personally do not have extremely strong feelings about any of the acronyms, as they're all a bit "eh". I feel like I have now covered most or all of the bases. Sorry if you are now knee-deep in discourse, but I feel like to a certain extent this is required or at the very least extremely com...

When I was a little girl, one of my favourite novels was a slim volume called The Great Good Thing . It tells the story of a spirited princess, Sylvie, who lives in a storybook kingdom - a literal storybook kingdom, since she's a fairytale character. Not content with living inside the book's margins, her courage and resourcefulness allow her to save her story. One section always stuck in my mind. Towards the end of the book, Sylvie is facing something she really, really doesn't want to do. She has no idea if her plan will work, and if it fails, everyone dies. A kindly maths teacher, who has advised her through most of the second half of the novel, tells her that "you can't solve a problem from the inside" - that is, you have to look outwards, even if it's uncomfortable. Although I haven't touched the book since I was in single digits, and I find it really corny now, that line always stuck with me - and probably even influenced my attitude to pro...

I have a problem with musical imagery. Music is always playing in my head - so I put on more music to drown it out. I also get bored reasonably easily and keep looking for new music to listen to. I whacked on some early music - Renaissance and Baroque stuff - because I hadn't listened to it in a while and I genuinely like it. (Yes, I'm pretentious. Complexity is my thing and early music offers plenty of it.) I haven't done any choral singing since July, so hearing a cappella music was something of a shock - like being slapped in the face with colour. I forgot how much I missed it. Unless you're into certain types of music, you're unlikely to come across much a cappella music, or even care that much. I think people should care more. Firstly, a cappella music emphasises the voice far more than usual. When you sing a cappella, you have no instruments to help keep you in time or on pitch, or to "mask" your voice. You just have you, and maybe an audibl...

Recently I went on a rant about how slating the eeeeevil Big Pharma without acknowledging that some people need medication to function fucks over disabled people . (For the people in the back, if the evil drugs from evil Big Pharma didn't exist, a hell of a lot more people would be dead. I hate a lot of drug companies' practices. I also acknowledge that illness is a real thing, and that medication can work even if development and marketing of drugs is done in a hugely troubling way, because I am not comfortable writing off millions of people's lives.) What I find grating is that several of the people who complain about how mental illness isn't real have...absolutely zero experience with mental illness, either as living with one or as having any kind of medical training. This is unsurprising; the less experience people have with a subject, the worse they are at appraising their own competence. They tend to assume that treatment for a mental illness is always medi...

The US and the UK share a lot of things - language, food and so on. One thing we don't seem to share is culture - or rather, a certain aspect of culture. I have never spent significant periods of time in the US, so my only exposure to American culture is through their media: publications, TV, movies and American people posting on social media. As such I acknowledge that I have a very limited and fragmented view of US culture. One thing does strike me: American people are much more focused on positivity in the sense of being generally upbeat and smiley. In fact, Americans pioneered the new thought movement (a precursor to the belief that you can influence the world with your thoughts) and a lot of the self-help genre as we know it today. In particular, the US is focused on being positive by avoiding anything or anyone deemed "negative". As in "no negative thoughts allowed", "complaining is bad for you", and so on. Thankfully, it seems to be getti...

Well. It's the day before freshers' week starts, which means that uni marketing has gotten slightly ridiculous (not sure why...we're all already signed up to be screwed out of money...maybe this is to make us feel better...). One question popping up over shiny social media is "what advice would you give to your first-year self?". I screwed up a lot in first year. Hey, at least I've not screwed up too badly this year; true, that's mostly because I haven't actually started it yet, but I'm trying to feel more positive about myself. As such, I feel qualified to give first-year me a lot of (hopefully useful) advice. And if any first years come across this, I really hope this helps! 0: Keep an eye on your physical and mental health and seek help immediately if you feel unwell. This is 0th on the list because it's the most important. You will have many, many chances to do well at basically everything. The thing with a body or a psyche is tha...

I'd like to think that I have principles: a desire to seek out truth; a desire to help others; focus on freedom of thought and expression; and questioning of authority. While they've attracted me to broadly being left of our predominantly conservative societies, they've also landed me in trouble. I'm attracted to science because it's possibly the most effective way of knowing that we have. Unlike any other way of knowing, it is self-correcting over time - not always easily or well, but it gets there. And it shows us wonders. For me, one of those wonders is a vast improvement in comfort and quality of life. People regularly live to seventy or eighty nowadays. Many more diseases are now survivable; vaccination has restricted many diseases around the world. We even managed to eradicate smallpox. Learning about science and keeping up with the news has also made me painfully aware that none of this is guaranteed. Antibiotic resistance is on the rise; antivaxx rheto...